Sobekhotep wrote:Here's the best thing about Japanese: no broken plurals!

They aren't that bad. There are a few different templates they follow, and it's merely an issue of memorizing which one to use. It's rather like English strong and weak plurals, except there are more of them.

How about Hausa? Afro-Asiatic grammar with implosives, ejectives, & lexical tone. At least it's not written with Arabic anymore. Officially, at least.

I have zero interest in West Africa (in any part of Africa really) so I doubt it. The one African language I might learn would be Swahili (and it doesn't have ejectives or tones).

More on topic, Japanese has a pretty simple phonology, except that accursed pitch accent. I'm still trying to figure it out. I can't really distinguish which words use it yet.

Talib wrote:Arabic and Persian would be one hard and one moderately difficult language. Arabic, Chinese and Japanese would be masochism. Might as well add Russian and Korean just to make things as hard as humanly possible.

Nope, it could be worse.

!Xóò + Nuxálk + Navajo/Tsez/Ubykh/Lezgian

Now that's as hard as humanly possible. (If you can still call this "human", of course…)

I mean, at least as for Arabic/Chinese/Japanese/Russian/Korean, materials are easier to find (and well probably less hard to understand as well), and they are not as useless if you don't live in their respective areas (thanks to things like the internet and literature tradition, and maybe immigrants if you live in places like Canada or the US).

Good point, but nobody would ever learn those languages. Out of the ones we do learn, Japanese and Russian are definitely in the top echelon of difficulty. Why must I always be interested in the hard ones?

How about Hausa? Afro-Asiatic grammar with implosives, ejectives, & lexical tone. At least it's not written with Arabic anymore. Officially, at least.

I have zero interest in West Africa (in any part of Africa really) so I doubt it.

I meant it as in how difficult would you rate it, like compared with Persian or Urdu.

Talib wrote:Japanese has a pretty simple phonology, except that accursed pitch accent. I'm still trying to figure it out. I can't really distinguish which words use it yet.

Don't worry about that. Even many native speakers don't speak with proper pitch accent.The best way to familiarize yourself with it is to watch/listen to lots of Japanese newscasts. Newscasters have to speak with perfect pitch accent.

Sobekhotep wrote:I meant it as in how difficult would you rate it, like compared with Persian or Urdu.

I can't say I know much about it.

Don't worry about that. Even many native speakers don't speak with proper pitch accent.The best way to familiarize yourself with it is to watch/listen to lots of Japanese newscasts. Newscasters have to speak with perfect pitch accent.

So it's like Swedish/Norwegian, where the realization of the accents varies between place to place, and some speakers don't have it at all.

Don't worry about that. Even many native speakers don't speak with proper pitch accent.The best way to familiarize yourself with it is to watch/listen to lots of Japanese newscasts. Newscasters have to speak with perfect pitch accent.

So it's like Swedish/Norwegian, where the realization of the accents varies between place to place, and some speakers don't have it at all.

I didn't even know we had pitch accent until I read about it on Wikipedia. It's amazing what things you don't know about your own language!

Don't worry about that. Even many native speakers don't speak with proper pitch accent.The best way to familiarize yourself with it is to watch/listen to lots of Japanese newscasts. Newscasters have to speak with perfect pitch accent.

So it's like Swedish/Norwegian, where the realization of the accents varies between place to place, and some speakers don't have it at all.

I think that's a good analogy.

Talib wrote:Have you never seen the Swedish Chef character on the Muppets?